Ornament & Crime

a Commission for The Electric Objects Art Club / animation + 3D modeling / Electric Objects 1 / January, 2016

from the release:

"Ornament & Crime is a reaction to an early-20th century essay by Adolf Loos, an influential text that would later became the genesis of the Bauhaus movement. The essay, written during the height of the Art Nouveau movement, attacked ornamentation as a waste of time and energy, since embellishments would only cause an object to go out of style.

With this idea in mind, Myers concocted outlandish and confounding scenes by roughly blending 3D scanned self-portraits with skulls and water simulations. Simultaneously raw and refined, the glitching video series acts as both an interpretation and response to the clean, modern sensibility preached by the Austrian architect."

Before making these works I'd been interested, for a long while, in not just fluid simulations, concretely, but also water, abstractly. Water is one of those things we take for granted in most parts of the world, but that is also at the heart of so many conflicts. It's a fundamental necessity. And like all such necessities it's somethign that we will viciously fight to control. A life-giver and a life-stealer.